The Tenth Anniversary
by Ocean of Ashes
Summary: Second in my New York series, a short story about a particular anniversary that Addison, Derek and Mark can't help but share.
1. Addison

Author's Note: Due to the kind reviews I received from five lovely readers of my new one-shot, _Remember the Debutante Ball_, I have decided to write a 'New York' Series. It will be a collection of one shots/short stories circling around Addison, Derek and Mark, either set in New York, or with a strong emphasis on their lives there. Some may lean towards Addison/Mark, some to Addison/Derek, but the pairings aren't really the point of them, it's more in the way of a character exploration, as I think the Addison/Derek/Mark dynamic was woefully underexploited. And don't worry, I won't be abandoning any of my ongoing stories – in fact, I'm plugging away at another chapter of _We die on the march _and hope to have finished by the end of the week at the latest.

Disclaimer: I believe I may have mentioned before that these characters are not mine, and if they were, they would be dancing to a very different tune.

_The tenth anniversary_

It was the first time she'd been back to New York since she had thrown a few clothes in a case and followed Derek to Seattle on a mission to save her marriage. Until now, she simply hadn't been able to face the scene of such abject failure, misery and despair. She was slowly forging herself a new life, but she still mourned the comfort of surety of her old one. She might drive past the old Brownstone while she was in the city, just to see it. She wondered if Mark ever did get his bike out of the basement, or if it still sat there, rusting in the damp or was thrown out as trash by the new owners.

The pilot announced they were beginning their descent and Addison clicked her seatbelt on and let her head rest back against the capacious first class chair. She wasn't totally sure why she wanted to go back now, why she suddenly felt ready to face up to it all. The best explanation that she could come up with, when she was trying to justify her sudden trip, was that it "felt right", which she knew wasn't exactly the finest rationalisation that she had ever come up with in her life, but it was the truth. This pilgrimage felt like the right thing to do.

It was September 11th the next day, and ten years since the life of every New Yorker had changed. Even for those lucky enough not to be directly affected by the collapse of the Twin Towers, those who didn't lose family or friends, the very fabric of their lives changed that morning. The identity of their city was permanently altered, and so was theirs. For those like Addison, who had witnessed some of the horrors first hand, they would never view the world through the same eyes again.

Like everyone, she remembered exactly where she had been when she heard the news. It was just one of those moments that would never leave you, like when the Berlin Wall came down, or Nelson Mandela was released, or John Lennon got shot (which wasn't quite as momentous as JFK, but she was too young to remember that). She was in the OR, of course, operating on a woman with a prolapsed uterus. She couldn't stop the bleeding and the patient's blood pressure had been dangerously low when she had heard Derek's voice buzz into the room from the intercom in the scrub room.

'Addie.'

'Kinda busy here,' she had replied without looking up. 'Clamp please. Jesus, where is all this blood coming from?'

'_Addie_,' he said again, and this time, there was the slightest of inflections in his voice that made a little cold, hard pebble of fear form in the pit of her stomach. It was the exact same tone he had used five years before, when he'd taken her out of a surgery to tell her her dad had died.

She looked up at him, and took in his ghost white features and the horror on his handsome face. Instinctively, she knew that something unutterably terrible had happened and a wave of nausea rose in her throat. The patient started to code.

'Shit. _Shit. _Another clamp, and hang another unit of O-Neg. And can someone get some suction in there please, I can't see what I'm doing.' Derek waited silently while the patient slipped from v-tach to asystole, and Addison shocked her once, twice, three times.

'Leave it,' he said eventually.

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'Leave it. She's been in asystole for ten minutes, you're not going to get her back.'

'Of course I will. Another round of epi,' she ordered.

'Addie. _Stop. _There isn't time.'

An overwhelming part of her wanted to carry on working on her patient. She wanted to work until she stopped the bleeding and restarted the woman's heart. She wanted to be able to go out to an anxious new father and tell him that he wasn't going to have to raise his baby son alone, and that his wife was going to be just fine. But most of all, she wanted time to stand still, and for Derek never to tell her the devastating news that she knew was awaiting her.

She looked down at the woman on the table. Derek was right, she wasn't going to get her back. She could flog her for another hour, try more fluids and more epi, but the outcome was going to be exactly the same. She stopped compressions, and stepped away.

'Time of death, 9.03 am. Clean her up,' she said to her intern, 'I don't want her husband to see her like that.'

Derek was waiting for her in the scrub room. She snapped off her gloves and pulled off her bloody gown. She had so much of the woman's blood on her she could smell its metallic warmth.

'What is it, what's happened?'

Derek reached out for her, not caring about the blood. 'It's something… terrible. Big. A plane has flown into one of the Twin Towers.'

She frowned, trying to grasp the meaning of his words. 'I don't understand. What do you mean?'

'No-one seems to know if it's an accident, or terrorists, or what. Just that a plane has crashed right into the building.'

While she was still trying to process the information, Derek's cellphone began to ring. 'Mark?... What, another one? What the Hell is happening?... No, I'm just telling Addie. We'll be right down.'

He carefully put the phone back in his pocket, and pulled Addison into his arms. She seemed to be in shock, and he spoke quietly into her hair. 'That was Mark. It's happened again, another plane. We have to get down to the ER, there's going to be hundreds of casualties. God knows what to expect.'

She nodded against his chest. 'Let me change my scrubs. I'm covered in blood.'

He helped her, then they went down to the ER to wait for the horror to hit them.


	2. Derek

Author's Note: I'll keep this short. I intended to write this all as one long piece, but it was going to end up at a ridiculous number of words for a one-shot so it's going to be four chapters, of which this is the second. Hope you enjoy, and thank you for the reviews on the first chapter.

Disclaimer: As before.

Going back to New York for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 had been Mark's idea initially. At first, Derek had baulked at the prospect – he hadn't been back there since the night he'd caught Addison and Mark in bed together. He'd let her in from the rain, and walked out the door, and just kept on going. His last memory of the place had been a sort of vision of Hell for him, and he had no desire at all to return.

Besides, Meredith would be thirty eight weeks pregnant by then, and even with six weeks to go, she was already the size of a house. She was bound to be early; he could hardly jump in a plane and fly to the other side of the country. It wouldn't be fair, and he'd been stuck in surgery when Meredith had gone into labour with Baby George – he wasn't going to miss it this time.

So when Mark had first pitched it to him, over a late night, post shift whiskey at the Emerald City Bar, he'd flatly refused. Said it was a stupid idea. Said he'd never go back there.

Mark, of course, had known exactly how to play it. He'd shrugged his shoulders, said fine, then dropped the matter, and Derek had thought that would be an end to it. It wasn't until a week later, when Derek came home from work to find Meredith and Mark sitting in the kitchen, Mark regaling her with the story of their September 11th. A magazine article was open on the table, which was talking about the impending tenth anniversary, and had obviously been the starting point for the conversation.

Mark sat silently, with a sickeningly smug grin, as Meredith said, 'Mark was just telling me about that day. I can't believe it's almost ten years ago.'

'Mm.' Derek made a non-committal noise and narrowed his eyes at Mark, who grinned even wider.

'It says in this article that there's going to be a big service there, that a lot of the rescue workers who helped at the scene are going to go back there.'

That was a leading statement if ever there was one.

'I wasn't at the scene. We all stayed in the hospital. As soon as the casualties started rolling in we were stuck in the OR for two days straight.' He tried to put her off, but he knew she wouldn't be having any of it.

'That doesn't matter, you were still a part of it, an important part. You saved people. Don't you _want _to go to the service?'

He thought about it. In a way, he did want to go to the service. So many people had died, some of his friends, and he wanted to be there to commemorate them. His cousin William was a stockbroker who had died when the North Tower collapsed, and he played squash with an EMT who had gone in to help and never came back. Pete, Pete Johnson. Oh, then there was that police officer who had been engaged to his intern. Officer Martelli, Cressida Martelli. O'Connell wasn't the same after that, and quit the following year to work with Doctors Without Borders, out in the Congo or something. And two of the fire fighters from the station down on Park Avenue who he and Mark used to drink with sometimes…

He realised then why Mark wanted to go back. They were New Yorkers, they were a part of this. They needed to be there, for themselves, their own identity, but there was something else as well. It was their duty to be there, for all those who couldn't.

He rolled his eyes. 'Fine. You win.'

Meredith looked confused.

Mark swung back on his chair a little, looking the epitome of satisfied. 'I've already booked the tickets.'

'You know I'm not paying you back, right?'

'That's cool. I gave the hotel your credit card details. I'm gonna empty the minibar.'

'How do you even know my credit card details?'

'Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to.'

It was a beautiful afternoon as their plane gently taxied down the runway at JFK and glided to a halt at the terminal building. That clear, blue September sunshine that Derek had always loved.

Addison's favourite season in New York had always been winter ("You can't wear cashmere when it's hot") and Mark's was summer ("Have you ever noticed how _little _women wear when the sun is shining?") but Derek had loved the fall. The way the leaves in Central Park faded from rich green to gold then red, and finally a crunchy brown that fell onto the sidewalks and paths and swirled in the wind. The edges of the leaves had just been tinted with gold that day.

When they had collected their luggage – just a small hold-all and a suit bag apiece – they made their way outside and hailed a cab. They sat in it in silence. They were friends again now, maybe not quite brothers again, but best friends, with Addison way behind them, but being here in New York seemed to bring some old wounds to the surface.

They were sitting in the hotel bar with a glass of Glenfiddich each, later that evening after a steak dinner, when Mark decided to test the waters.

'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

Derek rolled his eyes. Mark's games had always irritated him, he rarely just got to the point. 'I don't know what you're thinking,' he said.

'Yes you do.'

'No, I really don't.'

'You do.'

The other thing that irritated him was that Mark always won. 'Okay. Okay, you're thinking about Addison. And I'm _not_ thinking about her, I'm thinking about Meredith, and our son, and the fact that any day now she is going to be giving me another.'

'I was thinking about that day. 9/11. I was thinking about what we did that day. And so were you.'

Derek _had _been thinking about Addison, although Mark was right, he had been thinking about her in the context of that day. He remembered holding her hand, her gripping his tightly, as they ran down the stairs to the ER together. Mark had been waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.

'Any news?' Derek asked him grimly.

'Not much. The EMT units are reporting back that there is a lot of panic and confusion. No-one really knows what's going on. It sounds like both towers have been hit, and are now on fire. There's an evacuation going on but that's all we know.'

'Casualties?' Addison's voice was shaky.

'Hundreds. Probably thousands. We can expect the criticals to start rolling in any minute. Every hospital in the city is going to be inundated.'

In the distance, and over the hubbub of voices and the television that was mounted on the wall of the waiting area and currently turned up to full volume to keep up with events, they could hear sirens screaming towards them.

Derek felt Addison let go of his hand to tie her hair back in a pony tail. She'd washed her make up off when she was washing her patient's blood from her face, and she looked younger again, as wide eyed and innocent as she had been when they'd first met, a million years ago. He had a feeling that a lot of innocence was going to be lost today.

'Are you ready?' Mark asked them.

Addison nodded, and Derek murmured an acquiescence.

'Right then.'

The doors burst open and the first casualty rolled in. A paramedic, sooty and sweating, was shouting out the details of the patient. 'Female, late twenties, approximately thirty weeks pregnant, hit on the head by falling debris.'

Addison ran forward, and Derek followed her. 'That's us, we'll take her.'

After that, the next few days passed in a complete blur of atrocity. They were in the OR when they were told that the towers had collapsed, and as time went on, news reports were saying that maybe as many as five or six thousand people had died, but all they knew was that a sea of patients passed through their doors, under their scalpels. They all stayed on shift, on their feet, for forty eight hours before the exhaustion began to override the adrenalin, and sheer panic, that had been keeping them going.

Eventually, when the dehydration and fatigue had given him a headache so powerful that he could no longer see, Derek had let his body win the fight with his mind. He vaguely remembered Mark – how the Hell had he still been on his feet? – bundling him and Addison into a cab and taking them back to the Brownstone. He'd helped them into bed, still in their bloody scrubs, and then crashed out himself in the spare room.

They had all slept for twenty four hours straight, before dragging their aching bones out of bed and back to the hospital.

If possible, there were even more patients than before.


	3. Mark

Author's Note: Okay, so I am a horrible, bad person who never ever updates her stories. The only paltry excuse I have to offer is that the actual most important exam of my entire life/career is in five weeks and two days and its sorta taking priority right now. However, I have had this chapter written up on paper for about ten days, so I thought I'd take a time out and type it up. Reviews make revision more fun. You know you want to.

Disclaimer: As before.

The idea to go back to New York for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 had occurred to him when he was there for a visit the previous spring. For him, the city actually held happy memories, ones that hadn't been wiped out by the spectacular implosion of Derek and Addison's marriage, and he went back often, once a year or so, to catch up with old friends and old flings.

He went through the same ritual every time. He would check into the Ritz-Carlton, overlooking Central Park, then go for a walk in the park, past the Boathouse Restaurant, which was where Derek had prosposed to Addison, then he would sit on the Bethseda Terrace, overlooking the lake. That was where Addison had told him about the baby and, a couple of weeks later, about the abortion. She had been on a plane to Seattle the next day.

Unlike the other two, he revelled in _all _the memories, good, bad and indifferent. Derek and Addison were his family, the only ones he'd ever wanted anyway, and he didn't want to forget any of it.

In the evening, he would call up a girl, usually that cute little paediatrician, Heather, that he'd been sort of seeing before he went to Seattle, and take her out to a great steakhouse he knew. Most of the time, he managed to persuade her to go back to the hotel with him even though she was married now and knew better.

He had a million little rituals that he went through. Drinking in Furzeys Irish Bar with old friends, front row seats at a Yankees game if he was in town when there was a match on. Just walking down the street without getting rained on.

Another tradition was visiting Ground Zero. It wasn't that he'd lost anyone that he was _particularly _close to – some EMT and firefighter buddies, sure. Oh, and that sexy police officer he slept with a couple of times – Cressida Martelli; the one who had been engaged to Derek's intern. But the point was, everyone lost someone they knew. You couldn't _be _a New Yorker and not have your life touched by that day.

So when he heard there was going to be a special memorial service for rescue workers, there was really no question in his mind that he would be going. Okay, so he hadn't been out on site, but he would have been if he had been able to leave the hospital.

Christ, they had worked hard. There were patients _everywhere_, from the walking wounded through to critical crush and blast injuries, dying on the gurneys around them. Burn victims. Lost limbs. _Terrified _relatives at every turn, fearing the worst. Triaging was the most horrific job of all – actually having to decide who to save. He'd always had a bit of a God complex until then, but it turned out playing God wasn't nearly as much fun as he thought.

He had been operating on a woman with half a window embedded in her face, sharing an OR with Addison. It had been like that. If you found somewhere sterile to cut someone open, you were doing well. Addison was losing her patient, doing compressions, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw her sway a little.

'Addie, you okay?'

'Yeah,' she replied shortly.

'Sure?'

'Uh-huh.'

A couple of minutes later, she fainted, crashed to the floor amid a clattering of instruments.

Mark was just finishing up, and carefully put the last stitch in before rushing over to where Addison lay, a nurse and an R2 fussing around her. Gently, he lifted her head into his lap and brushed her hair away from her face.

'Addie, wake up,' he said quietly.

After a few moments, her face screwed up and she opened her eyes. It took a second or two for her to fully come around and take in her surroundings. As soon as she did, she tried to struggle to her feet.

'I'm fine.'

'No you're not.' In one movement, Mark gathered her up in his arms and stood up. He knew she wasn't heavy, but she felt like a lead weight and Mark realised just how exhausted he was. 'Come on, let's find Derek and get you home. We're no use to anyone like this.' Addison started to protest, but he shook his head firmly. 'Sleep and food, then we can come back.'

The last thing he remembered was finding Derek in the ER, looking as much a trauma victim as those they were trying to help. God knows how he had gotten them all back to the Brownstone – he had no recollection of it at all – but he woke up there, in the spare room, twenty four hours later, so he must have managed somehow.

After sleep, and a hastily grabbed meal, they went back to the hospital. Mark didn't know how long they worked that time, but when they were done, they found themselves not wanting to go home. Derek had heard that his cousin had died by then, and O'Connell couldn't get hold of Cressida; they were beginning to fear the worst. CNN was saying that the death toll might be as many as five or six thousand.

'Let's go for a drink,' he'd suggested, wondering if his own face was as pale as theirs.

'A drink?' Derek sounded faintly disgusted at the prospect of behaving so normally after the horrors they had witnessed, but Mark needed normality. He _craved _it. He needed to feel something like human again.

'We're alive,' he had said. 'Thousands aren't. And I don't know about you, but I could do with a whiskey.'

So they had gone to Furzeys, which was just down the street from the hospital. It was full of shell shocked doctors, nurses and paramedics. Some were exchanging stories, or asking if colleagues had been seen in desperate voices, but in general, people were quiet, too stunned to speak. The worst of the mania was over now – those who were going to make it were pulling through and those who weren't were lost, so many without a trace.

Mark bought them a double whiskey each, and a packet of cigarettes for Addison Derek hated her smoking, but he wouldn't argue tonight. He slipped into the booth they had found in the corner, and raised his glass.

'What are we toasting?' Addison asked.

Mark thought about it. He could have hailed so many things right then. The dead. The living, and those who hovered somewhere in between. The heroes. Themselves.

'New York,' he said eventually.

Derek and Addison raised their glasses alongside his, and echoed his words.

'New York.'


	4. New York

Author's Note: This is the final chapter of this little ficlet, and I just wanted to say thank you so much for the lovely reviews I have received. Dealing with such an emotive subject is always challenging and risky, so I'm just quite relieved I didn't offend anyone really. That some of you were kind enough to tell me that you thought I actually did a good job means a lot.

Disclaimer: As before.

Addison stopped at the Ritz-Carlton only long enough to check in and leave her luggage in her room. Until she stepped off the aeroplane into the familiar surroundings of JFK, she had felt an intense sense of trepidation about this visit, but not anymore. She had forgotten just how much she _loved _this city. In the morning, she decided she would find somewhere to sit and watch the sun rise over the ocean, the way it should be. Even after several years in California, watching the sun set as a glowing ball of red sinking into the sea still seemed strange and the wrong way around somehow.

But that was tomorrow. This evening, right now, she needed to find a bar. She wasn't going to be able to get through the night without at least some level of anaesthesia against the memories.

Office workers were pouring out of buildings and flooding the streets, ambling slowly in a distinctly un-New York style, to make the most of the September sunshine, and walking along, she saw groups of them sitting outside cafes and bars and sipping coffee, cocktails, wine.

Suddenly, she was struck by an idea. After 9/11, after all the turmoil had calmed and the enormity of what they had lived through was beginning to sink in, she, Derek and Mark had gone to a bar near the hospital. They had sat there drinking whiskey until the early hours. It had been just down the street from the hospital, what was it called again? Something Irish sounding. Foleys? Fitzgeralds? Furzeys. That was it. Given what was going to be happening tomorrow, the memorial service and everything, Furzeys seemed like the right place to be tonight.

It would be a good place to sit, and remember. It was selfish to think of it that way, but her life had changed that day too. She hadn't been able to pinpoint it at the time, but now, with the benefit of hindsight and a little peace in her life, she could see that 9/11 had been the catalyst in Derek starting to pull away from her. It happened to a lot of people's marriages that she knew then. People buried themselves in affairs or alcohol or worse as they tried to deal with their wounds and lessen the fear that gripped them, and she'd seen many break-ups, smugly thinking that that was never going to be her.

Derek's drug of choice had been work. A few extra shifts and longer hours morphed into several consecutive days spent at the hospital, snatching sleep in on-call rooms between surgeries. Cementing his status as a superstar surgeon, he had saved more and more lives, constantly haunted by the ghosts of those he hadn't been able to save that day.

It was so typical of him – being a hero wasn't enough for him, he had to be a superhero, except for the first time since they were nineteen, he didn't want to be her superhero anymore.

That night, sitting in Furzeys, had been the last time they had truly been Mark, Derek and Addison. The three of them against the world. Nothing had mattered more to them than each other, equally. Why couldn't they have stayed like that forever?

She hailed a cab, and sat back as it weaved through the traffic. If she tried really hard, she could close her eyes and pretend the last ten years had never happened. What had she been doing on September the _10__th_2001? It was five in the evening, so she would have been at work – her shifts were from seven until seven back then. Maybe she had been in surgery, or sitting around somewhere with Mark and Derek drinking coffee. There was this back corridor, out of the way of everyone, that they used to go to for some peace and quiet. She would put good money on that being where she was.

If she had known then what she knew now, what would she have done differently? After a decade of angst, things hadn't turned out so badly for her – would she want to change that? Would she give up what she had to turn back the clock with Derek, or even Mark? What advice would she have given to her younger self?

She didn't know the answer, but she decided that was just as well. The last ten years had in many ways been one long, painful lesson in living in the moment, and finally she was managing it.

The cab pulled up outside the bar, and immediately the memories of the place came flooding back. She remembered when they had been in here after they left the hospital that time. They had sat drinking whiskies well into the early hours in a silent shellshock but they hadn't been drunk. They hadn't been anything really, except anaesthetised for a brief period of respite before all the funerals had begun. In her mind's eye, she could see vividly the smoke from her cigarettes swirling around them as they stared at their glasses and each other.

Hesitating for a moment at the door, some deep instinct made her smooth down her hair and draw herself up to her full height before she pushed the door open. A part of her wasn't surprised, when her eyes had adjusted to the sudden darkness compared to outside, to see two very familiar figures standing at the bar.

It was quiet in there, and her heels clicked across the tiled floor towards them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Mark dragged Derek out of the hotel as soon as they had done checking in. The flight had been delayed, and it had taken forever to get a cab, so he was feeling distinctly crabby and in need of a beer. He shot Derek a _"you are totally under the thumb" _look as he called Meredith to let her know they had arrived safely, but had the grace to ask if he was an uncle yet.

'Who says you've got uncle status?'

'Why, are there any other contenders?'

Derek appeared to think about it for a moment, then sighed. 'Not really, no.'

'I'm a great uncle,' Mark replied with an air of supreme confidence.

In fact, Derek had to concede he was right. Not that money was an issue, but he had already set up a trust fund for George. _Well, look at me_, he'd said when Derek had asked him about it, _I'm never going to have kids. Who the Hell else am I going to give it all to? _He was also good with the little boy, and seemed to actually enjoy playing with him, spending hours hunkered down on the floor with toy trucks and big picture books. It gave Derek an insight into the man Mark might have been if… If what? What could have turned Mark into that man?

Having said that, he knew full well the question wasn't so much "what" as "who", and he already knew the answer to that. It was the same person who had turned _him _into that man, even if he had completed the journey with someone else.

Addison.

He had no idea when he had forgiven her and Mark for what they did. He had certainly never _told _them he had. Maybe he should do. It was a gradual thing he supposed, with time healing the worst agony of the betrayal, and a new life with Meredith to help with the scar tissue. Now, he had the peace and grace to feel that if Addison and Mark could find a slice of what he had, it wouldn't be a bad thing. He might even be okay if they found it with each other.

'Come on, let's go for a drink,' Mark was saying, and Derek followed him. God, it was weird being back in New York.

Mark headed straight for Furzeys Bar. He hadn't drunk in there with Derek since that nigh after the attacks and he was looking forward to it. A helluva lot of water had passed under the bridge since then, but finally, they were just about back to where they had been before. The only thing that he really regretted was that they had both had to sacrifice Addison in order to get there.

He strolled into the bar, aware that Derek was staring wide eyed.

'I'd forgotten about this place,' he said in wonderment.

Mark laughed. 'That's called old age.'

'Or too much whiskey, if you ever had anything to do with it.'

'That too.'

'I know why you've brought us here. It was where we came, that night, wasn't it? When it was all over.'

Sometimes, Mark couldn't believe how many things Derek had wiped from his memory. How could he have forgotten _any _of it? He knew it was because they had hurt him that much, but occasionally, in his more uncharitable moments, he couldn't stop himself from wondering whether Derek hadn't cared as much to begin with.

He pulled out his wallet. 'Do you want a drink?'

He was pretty sure he heard Derek say 'a beer will be fine,' or something similar, but suddenly his words seemed as if they were coming from a long way away. The bell over the door had just rung, and the small bar was filled with the sound of a distinctive footstep. He'd have known who it was anywhere in the world.

Without even bothering to turn around, he said to the waiting bartender, 'Three whiskies please, and a packet of cigarettes.'

'I don't smoke anymore.'

She sounded the same. She smelt the same too – Chanel perfume and hospitals and just a tiny bit of talcum powder. Her presence even did the same things to his stomach. He blinked, and waited a fraction of a second to be sure the whole thing wasn't a dream, then turned towards her.

All the things he wanted to say for years seemed to disappear, and all he could do was open his arms, and she stepped into them. He felt Derek with his arms around them as well, and there the three of them stood for the longest time.

When they eventually broke apart, Mark felt nearly as shell shocked as he had that night. 'What… what are you doing here?' he stammered.

'I flew in for the memorial service tomorrow.'

'And _here_?'

She shrugged. 'It felt…'

'Right?' Derek finished.

Addison smiled softly. 'Yes.'

They took their drinks, and sat at a table near the door. Each was furtively looking at each other. Addison had heard that Mark and Derek were friends again, but it was strange to witness it. They gave off the same sense of camaraderie as they had the first time she'd met them, at a freshman bio-chem lecture a million years ago.

It was Derek who was the first to break the silence. 'Before anyone says anything, there's something I want to say.'

'Fire away.'

'I was just thinking earlier, that I've never told you both that I forgive you, or that _I'm_ sorry. You've said it to me hundreds of times, and I've never said it back. So I just… wanted you to know.'

He sounded so humble, so un-Derek like, that any retort or sarcastic comment that Mark might have come up with was held back. He watched as Addison reached out – Addison, who had had to endure little short of a vitriolic campaign of hate waged against her – and took Derek's hand, and smiled. _Smiled. _

'That's okay.'

What could he say after that?

It was just then, looking at their clasped hands, that he noticed they looked just as they had last time they had been here together. And by that, he meant identical. Addison was wearing a wedding ring.

He pointed at it, and said accusingly, 'You're married.'

Her soft, wistful look transformed into a contented glow. 'Yeah.'

'Who to?' Derek asked.

She smiled at them both enigmatically. 'Does it matter?'

_Of course it does_, Mark wanted to roar, but he stopped short. _Did _it matter? He wanted desperately to know, but that wasn't the same thing. Did it honestly matter who Addison was married to? After all, Derek and Meredith were married, they had all moved on. Their old lives here in New York were over, they were different people now.

Slowly, he put his hand over where Derek and Addison were still holding hands.

'No, it doesn't matter at all.'

He raised his glass.

'What are we toasting?'

Mark considered it. There were a lot of things or people they could toast. William Shepherd. Cressida Martelli, Pete Jones. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety others who had died that day. The tens of thousands who had lost loved ones.

But their day would come tomorrow. Tonight, this was for the living. This was for the three of them, and their history.

'To New York,' he said.

They raised their glasses into the air.

'New York.'


End file.
